for this instinctive urgency.
This assault of sensation.
How did anyone bear it?
She barely noticed his shift in weight until the slide of the sheet became a torturous shiver down her body as he drew it away from her.
He stretched on his side next to her, freeing his hand to explore the skin he’d uncovered with carnal strokes.
When he turned to look at what he’d exposed to the lamplight, Mercy seized each side of his jaw with both hands and imprisoned his mouth to hers.
She’d thought she was ready to be naked.
But not to be revealed.
He didn’t protest as she plunged her tongue into his mouth, tasting his need, sweeping in the rhythm of her growing desire.
A clever finger traced inside her thigh, petted through soft intimate hair, dashing erotic sparkles of sensation over her entire body.
Her breath froze as he delved into bare, wet flesh. Her pulse didn’t just run, it fled, escaping her as he slid unhurried explorations through sensitized ruffles of feminine skin.
He broke the seal of their lips, moaning something in French she was too mindless to translate.
She melted—liquified—beneath his expert touch. She marveled at the slippery warmth of her own body’s response to him. Wondered if she should be ashamed. Or embarrassed.
Too entranced to bother with either.
She felt drugged with some throbbing intoxicant. It dragged her into a miasma of pleasure and threatened to drown her beneath turbulent, ocean-deep waves of sensation.
Languid explorations tightened to circles around the place where a shimmer of heat threatened to become a firestorm. His increasingly urgent breaths crashed against her mouth as he lingered upon the threat of a kiss, but kept his mouth enticingly elusive.
She clutched at him, with her fingers and with—Oh, God—the spasming intimate muscles of her sex as he drew a teasing circle around the entrance to her body.
A gasp closed her throat as he nudged gently there, and she stilled, not realizing until this very moment just how desperately she desired him inside of her.
“I want to taste you,” he growled. “Would you let me?”
“Yes,” she said impatiently, tugging at his shoulders to bring their lips back together. “Yes, of course. Please.”
His chuckle was demonic. “I like it when you beg.”
“I was not beggi—where are you going?”
He prowled down her body, wide shoulders rolling like a great cat as he did so. His nose and lips stopped to sample at her scent, and then nibble at soft and tender parts of her.
Her clavicles.
The undersides of her breasts.
The gently rounded plane of her belly.
“You’re clever, Inspector Goode, I’m sure you have some clue as to where I’m headed.”
The very thought made her nearly apoplectic, but she dug her fingers into the sheets so as not to stop him out of sheer humiliation.
“I thought you meant to kiss me,” she clarified.
His laugh would have made the devil shudder. “Oh, but I do. I mean to kiss you thoroughly.”
“But...but...” There? She squeezed her thighs shut as his lips trailed the short downy distance from her belly button to the triangle of dark gold hair below.
“Everywhere.” His hands nudged her wobbly legs open, and she nearly gave in to the instinct to protest.
She’d heard of the French being more wicked than the average lover, but this was beyond the pale. Wasn’t it? Or at least unhygienic...
Did he really mean to—?
Crisp air feathered across the wet heat between her parted legs. His fingers, firm and competent, pinned her thighs all the way open, utterly exposing her to him.
“Look at you,” he whispered, his words landing there. Against her most intimate parts. “Magnificent. I should have expected...”
Expected what? She wanted to ask.
Would have asked.
Had he not done exactly what he promised, and kissed her.
The shock of his hot wet mouth against her warm wet sex... She never could have imagined the contrast of it. The pure illicit pleasure it evoked.
She felt those lips everywhere.
Or perhaps her entire world simply faded to only contain what his mouth currently did to her.
All she knew was the heat of his breath.
The slick velvet of his tongue.
The gentle coaxing of his lips.
Mercy looked down the topography of her body as if such an act needed a witness.
Their eyes locked, and she thought of the serpent again—especially as his tongue flicked and slithered in gentle pulses over her most sensitive flesh.
The light burnished him in stark relief, his shoulders so corded and wide against the thin white skin of her limbs. His arms, so densely muscled, held her a willing hostage as he consumed her like a